Skeleton-Sectional Structural Analysis for 3D Printing

• 作 者: Wen-Peng Xu Wei Li Li-Gang Liu
• 机 构: School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
• 出 处: 计算机科学技术学报（英文版）
• 发表日期: 2016年3期
• 关键词: 3D printing sectional structural analysis skeleton mesh correction

3D printing has become popular and has been widely used in various applications in recent years. More and more home users have motivation to design their own models and then fabricate them using 3D printers. However, the printed objects may have some structural or stress defects as the users may be lack of knowledge on stress analysis on 3D models. In this paper, we present an approach to help users analyze a model’s structural strength while designing its shape. We adopt sectional structural analysis instead of conventional FEM (Finite Element Method) analysis which is computationally expensive. Based on sectional structural analysis, our approach imports skeletons to assist in integrating mesh designing, strength computing and mesh correction well. Skeletons can also guide sections building and load calculation for analysis. For weak regions with high stress over a threshold value in the model from analysis result, our system corrects them by scaling the corresponding bones of skeleton so as to make these regions stiff enough. A number of experiments have demonstrated the applicability and practicability of our approach.